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> In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI".

Most people don't know what the academic discipline of AI involves, I've noticed a bit of that even on this website. LLMs, even the worst of them, are objectively is a member of the set of things which is termed AI by those working in that field.

> (though I still suspect that was probably just a marketing hoax).

He was fired for saying that it was sentient, and they didn't release the model externally at the time, and they only made Bard available in response to the competition from OpenAI/ChatGPT.

Yes, it's a language model, not a reasoning model. But people got confused at the start.

Or they are adherents to the hypothesis of Linguistic Determinism which preexisted LLMs by quite some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism

Thank you. Few people really seem to acknowledge the name.

>It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different

Agreed, but I think we'll soon start to discover that interacting with systems as if they were text adventure games of the 80's is also going to get pretty weird and frustrating, not to mention probably inefficient.

Even worse, because the text adventure games of the '70s and '80s (at least, the ones that were reasonably successful) had consistent internal state. If you told it to move to the Back of Fountain, you were in the Back of Fountain and would stay there until you told it to move somewhere else. If you told it to wave the black rod with the star at the chasm, a bridge appeared and would stay there.

If you tell ChatGPT that your name is Dan, and give it some rules to follow, after enough exchanges, it will simply forget these things. And sometimes it won't accurately follow the rules, even when they're clearly and simply specified, even the first prompt after you give them. (At least, this has been my experience.)

I don't think anyone really wants to play "text adventure game with advanced Alzheimer's".

There was a great post here about this specific possibility, that NN crowd has effectively convinced themselves in the supernatural abilities of their NNs:

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

> It's only now that everybody's used to natural language interfaces that I think we're becoming far less forgiving (...)

Sort of, kind of. Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet, and in that time there weren't many non-shit integrations released. So at best, some small subset of the population is used to the failure modes of ChatGPT app - but at least the topic is there, so future users will have better aligned expectations.

> Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet

Siri. Introduced 2011.

Before that...

Q&A Database, the product that Symantec was founded to sell. Released 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_(Symantec)

Before that...

The Infocom adventure game parser.

https://www.ifwiki.org/Infocom-type_parser

Infocom was founded in 1979.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom

Before that...

SHRDLU, 1968.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

Before that...

ELIZA? (1964)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

> Siri. Introduced 2011.

Not working well to this day. Siri is mostly a joke and a meme, much like Alexa, Cortana and Google whatever-they-call-it-now.

Other stuff: yeah, you can get away with a lot using some formal grammar, a random number generator, and a lot of effort railroading the user so they won't even think to say anything that'll break the illusion. I've had people not realize for weeks that my IRC bot is a bot, even if all it did was apply a bunch of regular exceptions to input (the trick was that the bot would occasionally speak unprompted and react to other people's conversations, and replied to common emoticons and words indicating emotion).

No, only in the last two years we can say that there exist Speech-to-Text that works reliably, Text-to-Speech that sounds natural, and a ML model that can parse arbitrary natural language text and reliably infer what you want, even if you never directly stated what you want, and handling for it was never explicitly coded.

I disagree.

I think you are presenting a gradual incremental change as some sort of binary transition, and it isn't. This is at best disingenuous and misleading and at worst it's a flat out lie.

Text-only natural language interfaces were working in the 1960s and working well by the 1980s.

Live real-time speech recognition with training was working by the turn of the century, and following a hand injury, I was dictating my work into freeware for a while by 2000 or so. It was bundled with later versions of IBM OS/2 Warp.

Real-time speaker-independent speech recognition started working usefully well some 15 years ago, and even as a sceptic who dislikes such things, I was using it and demonstrating it a decade ago. It's been a standard feature of mainstream commercial desktop OSes as well as smartphones for about 8-9 years. Windows 10 (2015) included Cortana; macOS Sierra (2016) included Siri.

In fact, after I posted my previous comment, this morning Facebook reminded me that 8Y ago today I was installing Win10 on my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad.

I don't allow any of these devices in my home but they're a multi-billion dollar in domestic voice-controlled hardware.

This is mainstream used by a double-digit percentage of humanity.

You seem to have been deceived by the LLM bot fakery of "intelligence" that it's achieved some quantum leap in smarts recently. This is illusory.

I must have really bad luck for voice control systems, because I've tried most of them, and there were only two that reliably worked for me:

1) Most recent breed of ML models, backed in part by LLMs;

2) A voice control system I hacked together some 17 years ago, with Microsoft Speech API and a cheap microphone I soldered to a long cable and stuck to the side of the wardrobe. It had the benefit of using a fixed grammar tree, and it was in the saner time when the vendor actually allowed you to train the system on your own texts.

Everything else - especially current voice assistants and dictation software on the couple flagship phones I've used over the years - was garbage compared to that.

So again, I must be the unluckiest person in the world when it comes to voice recognition, because what you wrote is entirely counter to my experience.

I am not talking about my own experience, though.

I'm talking about what I see in the world. The people who own Apple watches and iPhones who rarely even take the phone out of their pocket/bag any more. The folks whose light switches are never used or who are even getting them removed. The people who don't use things like kitchen timers any more. The disappearance of physical or local music/video collections.

I think these trends are observable and widespread.

Me? I don't go near any of them, myself.

> The folks whose light switches are never used or who are even getting them removed.

Eh, I know an anecdote isn't a statistic, but my experience with voice controls is so bad that I've mostly gotten rid of the "smart" parts and gone back to the light switches.

Back when we had Alexa, we'd say "Alexa, Küche aus" ("kitchen off") and it would reply "Ich kann nicht 'Küche' im Spotify finden" (worse, we didn't have Spotify).

Siri is less bad, but it still just randomly fails. I've had two devices in the same room try to respond to the same voice command, one succeeds and the other spins around for a bit and responds with a spoken generic error.

For the voice input keyboard, the error rate is much worse, bad enough that in my experience I might as well have typed one real word and let autosuggest write the remainder of whatever I was not-typing.

I find that easy to believe.

I have watched my friends with this kit demonstrate it to me, many times, and to me it seems clumsy and difficult and error-prone, as well as being expensive, vastly horribly insecure and not so much violating privacy as gang-raping it.

I do not understand why they like it or think it better.

The only friend I know with a valid use case is non-light-sensing blind. It's useful for him to just tell the room "turn the lights off" rather than hunt for the switch. Or ask if they're on.

(Yes he has lights. He's married with a kid.)

I love this. I want a t-shirt with this

"So, when will you be updating yourself to not provide the same wrong answer in future, or when I ask it later in a new session"

"No."